OpEdNews - Page 2 of Article: The Air Force Cover-Up of that Minot-Barksdale Nuclear Missile Flight

     So why isn’t it making the hair stand up on the back of the necks of members of Congress?

   Incredibly, to date, there has been no demand for public hearings into this frightening incident.

   Congress appears ready and willing to accept the Air Force whitewash at face value: It was an accident. It won’t happen again.

   That is not good enough!

   We need honest answers to some hard questions. Among them:

   * Who disabled the alarm systems on those weapons and on the bunker itself?

   * Who mounted six nuclear weapons on the noses of six cruise missiles and put those missiles onto a B-52 launch platform?

   * Who authorized them to perform this operation?

   * Who moved the armed weapons out of the Bunker at Minot AFB and mounted them on the wing of a B-52 bound for Barksdale AFB? (Barksdale, it should be noted, bills itself as the main staging base for B-52s being flown to the Middle East Theater.)

   * Were the six missiles flyable? Were they fueled up and ready to fire, or were they not fueled at the time of the Minot-Barksdale flight?

   * Was there targeting information in the missile’s guidance computers and if so, what were those targets?

   * What happened to the three military whistleblowers who blew the whistle on this incident and reported it to a journalist at the newspaper Military Times?

   * Why hasn’t the Air Force or the FBI investigated the 6-8 untimely deaths including three alleged suicides, one of a Minot weapons guard, one of an assistant defense secretary, and one of a captain in the super-secret Air Force Special Commando Group, as well as alleged fatal vehicle “accidents” involving four ground crew and B-52 pilots and crewmembers at Minot and Barksdale? Could any of this strange cluster of deaths have been related to the incident? The Air Force “investigation” didn’t even mention these incidents, and my investigation, reported in the Oct. 24 issue of the magazine American Conservative ("The Mystery of Minot", Oct. 24, 2007 issue), found that none of the police investigators or medical examiners in those incidents had even been contacted by Air Force or other federal investigators.

   The Secretary of Defense appears to have been upset about this incident. Secretary Robert Gates ordered an unprecedented stand-down of all air bases in mid-September to check out and account for the entire nuclear inventory, and a general was dispatched immediately to Minot after the discovery of the wayward nukes on August 30 to investigate what had happened. Following a subsequent Air Force investigation, 70 people at Minot and Barksdale AFBs were removed from their posts and decertified from handling nuclear weapons, including five officers, one of them the Minot base commander.

   * But a base commander does not have the authority to order nuclear weapons to be loaded on a plane and flown. So who issued that order and why has no one at a senior level in Washington been sacked?

   There is speculation that the order may have come via an alternate chain of command.

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